Bertien van Manen
"Let’s Sit Down Before We Go"

Exhibition: 14 December 2023 - 3 February 2024
Opening: Thursday, 14 December, 7pm

"I have to like the people I photograph. I need to feel an attraction, a fascination." — Bertien van Manen

Buried deep in Bertien van Manen's images is an intimacy between photographer and subject. The viewer trespasses on the private moments in the frame, catching a glare over breakfast, unheard words between friends, both party to the action and intruding on it.

Between 1991 and 2009 van Manen travelled across Asia and Eastern Europe with a small, analogue camera, learning the local language and engaging with the people who would become the subject of this collection.

"Let's sit down before we go" is a portrait of the places van Manen visited and the people she met, stayed with and became friends with during her travels across Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Siberia, Tatarstan and Uzbekistan.

Across nearly two decades, with the exception of big cities, little about the scenery in van Manen's photographs has changed. The relative sameness of Russia's appearance binds the images together, leaving us no indication of the time lapse from one photograph to another.

The title, "Let's sit down before we go", represents an old Russian tradition, the practice of taking a moment, stopping to think before embarking on a journey, to consider where we will be travelling to and why. The internationally renowned Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen (*1942, The Hague, Netherlands) is regarded as one of the renovators of documentary photography. She started her career as a fashion photographer, after having studied French and German languages and literature. Inspired by Robert Frank’s "The Americans" she travelled around, photographing what she saw. She had her first exhibition at the "Photographers Gallery" in London in 1977. She uses an inexpensive snapshot camera to take photos of people she meets, as she feels that this camera allows her subjects to consider her "as a tourist or friend, who likes to take pictures". She has photographed extensively in China, the Appalachian Mountains in the USA and the former Soviet Union. Her work has been exhibited by all major photography institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Fotomuseum Winterthur and it is found in major collections, both public and private.